Understanding Disengagement in Just-in-Time Mobile Health Interventions

Just-in-time (JIT) intervention aims to proactively detect a user's problematic behaviors and deliver interventions at an opportune moment to facilitate target behaviors. However, prior studies have shown that JIT intervention may suffer from user disengagement, a phenomenon in which a user's level of engagement with intervention apps and target behaviors declines over time. In this study, we aimed to deepen our understanding of disengagement in a mobile JIT intervention system. As a case study, we conducted a user study with college students (n = 54) for eight weeks to understand how disengagement appears over time and what factors influence user disengagement. Our findings reveal that personal traits, such as boredom proneness and self-control issues, are closely related to disengagement, with key factors including 1) boredom and habituation related to repetitive and monotonous JIT interventions, 2) inopportune alarm, 3) distrust for the JIT feedback mechanism, and 4) a lack of motivation due to low rewards. We provide theoretical and practical design guidelines for follow-up studies on JIT intervention system design.